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Streetcar lines grew and prospered in Dallas from 1872 until the 1920s. Automobile competition siphoned many of their riders away, but ridership soared again during World War II. After the war, the trolleys entered an era of gradual attrition, and they were abandoned by 1956. Amazingly, in 1989, the nonprofit McKinney Avenue Transit Authority (MATA) returned restored vintage trolley cars to the city in the Uptown neighborhood near downtown. MATA evolved from a tourist attraction into a true transit company and became the M-Line. Since then, the area has experienced rapid growth and is now home to midrise office buildings and upscale apartments.

No area of Portland, Oregon, played a more important role in street railway history than Northwest Portland and the neighborhood known as Slabtown. In 1872, the city's first streetcars passed close to Slabtown as they headed for a terminus in the North End. Slabtown was also home to the first streetcar manufacturing factory on the West Coast. In fact, until locally built streetcars began to be replaced by trolleys from large national builders in the 1910s, more than half of all rolling stock was manufactured in shops located at opposite ends of Northwest Twenty-third Avenue. All streetcars operating on the west side of the Willamette River, including those used on the seven lines that served Northwest Portland, were stored in Slabtown. When the end finally came in 1950, Slabtown residents were riding two of the last three city lines.

From 1901 to 1969, Angels Flight was America's most famous incline railway, familiar from its many appearances on postcards and in pulp fiction and film noir. It inspired the titles of five novels, including a 1999 best seller, and three films. Angels Flight's two colorful trolleys glided up and down the side of Bunker Hill in the heart of Los Angeles, carrying 100 million passengers between a downtown business district and a Victorian aerie that gradually deteriorated into a gritty slum. When the city turned Bunker Hill into an acropolis of skyscrapers, Angels Flight was packed up like a boy's electric train set and stored away for nearly 30 years. After a restoration in the mid-1990s that led to a fatal accident, Angels Flight has reopened and is now ready to claim its next chapters in Los Angeles history.